Wednesday, April 15, 2015

New Study: unionization pays off for community college instructors

A recently released study found that "being represented by a
union pays big financial dividends for full-time instructors at
community colleges."

Peter Schmidt writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Depending on the size,
location, and public-financing sources of their institution, unionized
full-time instructors earn from about 5 to 50 percent more in pay and benefits
than do their nonunionized peers at similar community colleges, says a paper
summarizing the study’s results.

"The differences are
stunning," says Stephen G. Katsinas, a professor of higher education at
the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa who is one of the study’s three
co-authors.

Among the forces
influencing how much community colleges pay their instructors, "collective
bargaining, in itself, matters," says Mr. Katsinas, who plans to present
the study’s findings in New York on Sunday, at an annual conference held by the
National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and
the Professions.

Other research on the
impact of collective bargaining on faculty pay has struggled to quantify how
much differences in instructors’ earnings were attributable to unionization
versus other contributing factors, such as differences in institutional size or
in the regions that colleges served.

Mr. Katsinas and other
scholars reached conclusions similar to the new study’s in a 2006 analysis of
community-college data, but that effort was hampered by a reliance on outdated
data on where unions existed. It also failed to take into account 113
institutions — among them, large community-college districts such as Miami-Dade
— that could not be factored into an analysis of community colleges under the
classification scheme used by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching.

The new analysis uses a
modified classification scheme to factor in the previously excluded
institutions, which include community colleges that either offer four-year
degrees or are offshoots of four-year public institutions, as well as public
baccalaureate colleges that primarily offer associate degrees. It uses federal
data on faculty earnings from the 2010-11 academic year, the last for which the
Education Department collected information on benefits.

"There are amazing
differences in monetary compensation of full-time faculty across the landscape
of community colleges when geography, collective bargaining, and local
appropriations are all accounted for," the new study concludes.

On average, it found,
unionized full-time faculty members annually received pay and benefits
amounting to about $95,000 at community colleges that received a significant
share of their funds from local governments and about $77,000 at community
colleges that lacked such a local source of financial support. Nonunionized
faculty members received less than $68,000 in pay and benefits, on average,
regardless of where their community college derived its tax revenue.

The size of the community
college where a faculty member worked and the type of community it served also
made a big difference.

At the top of the pile,
full-time faculty members at suburban, multicampus, locally financed community
colleges annually earned an average of nearly $106,000 in pay and benefits. At
the bottom, such faculty members at small, rural, locally financed community
colleges earned total compensations averaging just over $61,000.

The other authors of the
new study were Nathaniel J. Bray, an associate professor of higher-education
administration at the University of Alabama, and Barry R. Mayhall, a doctoral
student in higher education at Alabama and a mathematics instructor at Snead
State Community College, in Boaz, Ala. The paper on their findings will be
released after next week’s conference.